China Reveals the Utilization of Military Hacker Teams

China has confessed to the presence of special cyber warfare units, as tensions between the country and the United States over cyber-espionage continues to grow.

China has, for some time now, been linked to high profile cyber-attacks and state-sponsored efforts. The country has always denied the existence of military hackers who are assumed to be running these assaults. Nevertheless, for the very first time, China has officially disclosed that its military does have dedicated cyber warfare units — in fact, the state sponsors a lot of them and they all specialize in specific areas.

In October of 2014, FBI Director James Comey said cyberattacks originating from China targeting US businesses cost firms billions of dollars every year. Comey took it a step further, calling Chinese hackers ‘competitive’ and ‘prevalent’ in their efforts to break into US systems.

According to McReynolds, the digital military strategy in China was split into three different sections. Two of which have been made known… one unit consists of of civilian teams, that have been given the go ahead by the Chinese military to carry out, “network warfare operations.” Another unit functions as an umbrella for ‘external things’ which, “may be organized and mobilized for network warfare operations,” and act beyond government departments.

The Chinese military specialist says that US firms are targeted by every unit, looking to steal valuable data associated with e-commerce and the companies themselves. This, consequently, would give an increase in the international market to Chinese companies.

A study, “FireEye,” conducted by the Mandiant cyber-forensics team in 2013, asserted that a 12-story building associated with the PLA sponsored one such unit, ‘Component 61398’ — which has links to several other advanced Chinese hacking groups, including the ‘Opinion Team’ and ‘Shanghai Group.’ Mandiant says that ‘Component 61398’ was probably responsible for an “overwhelming” amount of cyber-attacks… at the time, Chinese officials dismissed the claims as “groundless.”

SOURCE:

“China Reveals Existence of Cyber Warfare Hacking Teams” ZDNet. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2015.